An op-ed commentary we ran recently celebrated the glories of Massachusetts as compared with poor, low-taxing Arizona. The authors claimed Massachusetts' quality of life and infrastructure came at a cost of modestly higher taxes. By "modest" they meant 50 percent higher. But now Gov. Deval Patrick is proposing a $2billion income-tax hike to add to a state budget already 30 percent larger than when Patrick took over from Mitt Romney. Not much modesty there.

It was a defining image of the Great Recession: floundering college grads stuck back home, living in Mom and Dad's basement. But while rooted in some truth, that picture doesn't show fully how the prolonged economic downturn broadly impacted people in their early 20s, according to a new study out Wednesday.